Conservation around the Millennium (Hungarian National Museum, 2001)

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DISCUSSION OF THE ISSUE

The Diploma Committee has a very delicate role in this whole diploma process. Some members are supervisers of the practical work as well, some judge only the written text (i.e. the art historian or the scientist). Their usual problem is: how much they should leave the student alone in his/her formulating job, and how much to help. Does a lot of changing and corrections still belong to the "training” or the diploma work should be a work done completely alone, and than the Committee would judge the result.

The author of this contribution thinks that the opinion about this and the process itself may be completely different from one training program to the other. In Hungary, when starting with the first diploma works in 1995 the high position teachers and the Diploma Committee decided to put in focus the “training". The arguments for this have been:

a) In the very final aspect the school is responsible for the objects of the diploma work which goes back to its owner’s collection.

b) The written report on the diploma work remains with the school and shows how much the student could learn during the five years.

c) This will be the main "hard copy” preserving the level and the expectations toward a conservation job of a student after five year hard learning, as well as the level of success of the school in achieving its mission statement and objectives.

d) The written diploma works will serve as a pattern for future diploma works, as a source of references and specialist literature. So, the responsibiliy of the Diploma Committee is as big as the student's one.

But - if the Diploma Commitee helps the student too much, how can it evaluate the student’s individual work? Our answer was: by records made by the members of the Diploma Committee. Every member can record how much effort and successful work has been put in from the student's side and how much that particular teacher had to contribute to achieve a well formulated and informative written material. At the end all diploma works will appear “perfect”, according to our expectations. But all the gradings will NOT be five, the gradings consider the student's individual work and provide a truth evaluation on it. Naturally the students are informed about this system before they start working.

As a result - according to our hope - we have a valuable and high level collection of diploma works in the library - in Hungarian. So, it is a good literature source for Hungarians. But if we want to inform the world about the quality of our academic training program, we have to find a solution to publish this works in worldwide spoken foreign languages. It could be one volume year, or in article forms in various international periodicals, conference materials. We are now in front of this decision and we have to make a policy.

EXHIBITION OF THE DIPLOMA WORKS

And last but not least, an exhibition is organised from the diploma works in every year. This has a long past with the previous training program and was always put in the lecturer room of the HNM. The house, where one can found the HNM Training Centre, outside the main building, does not has permanent exhibitions, in this term it does not act as a museum. The building is rather deteriorated and

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